Everyone knows Smokey Bear, Woodsy Owl, and maybe even Ranger Rick Raccoon, but there are many other forest and forestry-related fictional characters that long ago fell by the wayside. Peeling Back the Bark‘s series on “Forgotten Characters from Forest History” continues with Part 14, in which we examine Abel Woodman.

“A Character is Coming to Crossett.”

This was the headline on a small announcement item greeting scrupulous readers of the December 1947 issue of Forest Echoes. As our faithful Peeling Back the Barkers know, Forest Echoes was the popular local monthly magazine published by the Crossett Lumber Company of Crossett, Arkansas, between 1939 and 1962. But who was this new character being teased in the magazine’s final issue of 1947? Curious readers were assured of an answer in the new year: “Don’t miss next month’s Forest Echoes, you owe it to yourself to meet this character.”

As promised, the mysterious new character made his debut in the January 1948 issue. Found in a one-panel comic in the back of the magazine was a well-built man with beady eyes, smoking a pipe and holding a large axe. The man was dressed in traditional lumberjack garb (boots, suspenders, flannel shirt) and there was no doubt about his location—a large Crossett smokestack was visible in the background.

First-ever appearance of the man who would become Abel Woodman, January 1948 (click to enlarge).

The only problem was he had no name. To rectify this, the Forest Echoes editorial staff created a contest, inviting readers to submit their name ideas for the new character. As seen under the cartoon above, the best entry would win a $25 U.S. Savings Bond (side note: The “I ain’t Mr. Hush…” comment references a famed 1946 contest on the Truth or Consequences radio game show, where host Ralph Edwards phoned random people and asked them to identify a mystery voice known only as “Mr. Hush”).

The following month a winner was announced. Thanks to the entry of William “Bill” Preston Haisty, the new character was officially christened “Abel Woodman.”

Click to view the full February 1948 Abel Woodman cartoon.

Abel Woodman immediately became a regular monthly feature of the magazine. At the back of every issue readers would find Abel delivering a message on forest conservation, job safety, or some other local topic, always in his own humorous way. Like the Forest Echoes publication itself, the Abel Woodman cartoon was a reflection of life in Crossett and Crossett’s view of the world (in this case through the eyes of artist Lee Davis). Abel Woodman cartoons provided a unique commentary on issues specific to Crossett (a new town jail, Crossett High football, a redesigned company logo, the joys of Crossett bleached food board!) as well as more general concerns (taxes, the dangers of drinking and hunting, anxiety over the atomic bomb).

Abel remained a permanent fixture on the inside back cover until the final issue of Forest Echoes in June 1962 (the year Georgia-Pacific purchased the Crossett Lumber Company). For this fourteen-year run, the Abel comic was drawn by artist Lee Davis. In his final year Davis found a way to put himself in the action alongside Abel.

Davis did get help from the public along the way. In 1958 Forest Echoes held a “Cartoon Editor” contest, inviting the public to submit “a situation and appropriate remark for an Abel Woodman cartoon.” Ten winners won $10 each and had their cartoon ideas drawn by Davis and printed. The first winning entry (from Lloyd Gardner) was published in March 1958, and is notable in that it foresaw “Moon Trees” a good thirteen years ahead of Stuart Roosa’s journey into space.

The final Abel Woodman cartoon ran in the last issue of Forest Echoes in June of 1962. His glory years seemingly already behind him, Abel had been reduced to company shill—touting the benefits of charcoal made by the Crossett Chemical Company. Despite this inauspicious end, Abel Woodman lives on in Crossett. In 2002 an “Abel Woodman” statue was erected in a small park in the middle of town. The original Abel Woodman also lives on here at FHS in our collection of Forest Echoes magazines, and our other materials documenting the history of the company town of Crossett, Arkansas.

Continue below to view a few more Abel cartoon classics.

Before I left to join the Thoreau-Wabanaki Journey on May 26, I had planned to write a blog post that would tie together the 150th anniversary of the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods with George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature and the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Wilderness Act. The pièce de résistance would be posting it in time for National Get Outdoors Day on June 14. (As if those weren’t enough signs from Above about what to write, Mark Harvey’s new book on Howard Zahniser, architect of the Wilderness Act, arrived in the office today. It opens with a quote from Thoreau’s “Chesuncook,” the second essay in The Maine Woods.) After all, paddling through wilderness in northern Maine would offer the perfect opportunity for bringing these themes together in one essay.

But when friends ask me to tell them about the canoe trip down the Penobscot River, I find I’m at a loss for words. They are stunned by this. Usually when I start talking of history or recent travels they remind me at some point that they have a plane to catch next week or it’s time to schedule a root canal. But my trip leaves me unable to really describe what I saw and did. And that, perhaps, was the point of the trip. It was for the experience of being in wilderness, not to document it through writing or photographs. Though I tried to do that, I found my enjoyment increased greatly once I stopped trying to interpret or capture it for others or even for myself. To intellectualize or deconstruct wilderness is to miss the point of being there. The reason for being there was to be there—to be present in the moment, to experience it, with all my senses. Thoreau told me why I was there when he wrote in his journal, “The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it.” It took a day or so for me to come to this realization. I was initially so focused on documenting the trip that I was limiting my experience. Everything changed with this epiphany.

So, perhaps the question I should answer is, what did I experience?

Quiet. In the wilderness there’s a level of quiet that cannot be found anywhere else but there. We had a couple of days where we heard no mechanical sounds—no cars, no airplanes, no cell phones. No hum of a refrigerator or air conditioner. The quiet would be broken by sounds I now desperately miss: the murmur of rapids or of conversation coming from another boat or tent, the excited shout when someone spotted an eagle soaring above or a muskrat swimming about us, the cursing of the cold in the morning or the mosquitoes in the evening. Yet even the negatives became positives. Is there any greater sound on a cold morning than hearing “Coffee’s ready” or after swatting away bugs while setting up the tent than “Dinner’s ready!”? After returning to what we came to call “uncivilization” and getting in a car, I couldn’t stand to have the radio on and preferred having the window down so I could just hear the wind. (Perhaps “window” should be spelled “wind-oh!” to truly reflect that delightful feeling of hearing the wind rushing by.) We had long stretches on the river where I’d only hear the sound of paddles entering and exiting the water. But, oh, the quiet! I cannot find it in Uncivilization. This is why we have the Wilderness Act, to provide a place to escape to, to protect Civilization from the Uncivilized.

An emptiness that filled my soul. It felt like there were probably fewer people living in northern Maine now than when Thoreau traveled through there some 160 years ago. The area seems devoid of people. When talking with a native Mainer afterward, I described the region as a “big empty.” He immediately understood this as the great compliment I meant it as. So often we hear people say they want to “get away from it all,” when in fact they mean they want to go to a place that is not their home or office. Usually this means to some other building—be it a vacation house or hotel or resort. Whereas in the middle of nowhere, in the Big Empty, I truly was away from it all. Being “inside” meant being in a tent and the “bathroom” had some of the best views imaginable. We spent three nights on islands that only three weeks before had been under water. Initially intending to post to social media during the trip, I quickly realized this was impossible and put my cell phone away, shoving it to the bottom of my bag. I hoped we wouldn’t have connectivity until the last day. It was a little depressing that we had it before then.

Being on the river led me to not only embrace but to understand Thoreau’s exhortation in Walden: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” Time on the water brought about that simplicity; my “affairs” were reduced to three—eat, drink, paddle. Eat everything offered to me whether I like it or not, drink as much water and coffee as possible to stay hydrated, and paddle hard and straight to get where we needed to go. Granted, we were well provisioned, so unlike Thoreau I didn’t worry about getting by on hard bread or the modern equivalent, dehydrated foods, or having to forage. (However, one night we supplemented dinner with ground nuts harvested from around the campsite. Quite the tasty luxury!)

But, simplicity! Why worry about inclement weather or being in wet clothes? These are things I couldn’t control, so why fret or grouse about them? As HDT said of traveling in Maine, “You soon come to disregard rain on such excursions.” One of the most relaxing afternoons was spent sitting under the forest canopy during a thunderstorm that drove us off the river. (Sit and listen to a thunderstorm and tell me it’s not relaxing.) We often quoted Thoreau from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: “Cold and damp? Are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness?” The simpler things became, the happier I became. Emptying my mind of worry filled my soul.

Thoreau is right: Cold and damp is as rich an experience as warm and dry.

The Hudson River landscape painters were right. I came away from the trip understanding that some Hudson River School painters captured reality in their works. Sanford Gifford, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, and others make great use of light to draw the viewer’s focus to a particular point in a painting. But until now I’d thought what they depicted on canvas could never have occurred in nature, that they were exaggerating the contrasts between light and darks places. I was disabused of this on my first morning in camp.

The view that proved my suppositions all wrong. Though that’s not Mount Katahdin in the background, the effect is the same as in Church’s painting.

“Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp” by Frederick Church (1895) (Wikimedia Commons; painting is at the Portland Museum of Art)

And I experienced humbleness. It’s good to be reminded that you can learn a whole lot by opening your eyes, ears, and mind. Like a good way to predict the weather is to actually look at the sky! Whoa. I know, right? Who thinks of that nowadays, what with instant weather apps on their phone? But sure enough, after we spotted a cloud formation called a “mare’s tail,” we had rain within 24 hours, just as the old local saying said we would. Or that the smallest of obstacles—like a single rock in the river lurking just below the surface—can upend a boat. Or that experts are considered experts for a reason. I experienced this time and again with our lead guide, who ensured that 52 people made it through the trip without injury, as well as with the two professors who served as Thoreau experts and with the members of the Penobscot Indian Nation who shared their intimate knowledge of the area and their history with us. I remain in awe of all of them, and stand humbled before them, as I do the landscape they love and shared with the rest of us.

The following book review by FHS staff historian James G. Lewis appears in the Scientists’ Nightstand section of the July-August 2014 issue of American Scientist.

ARMING MOTHER NATURE: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Jacob Darwin Hamblin. 320 pp. Oxford University Press, 2013. $29.95.

In May 1960 scientists and military officers at NATO headquarters came to a conclusion about the massive earthquake that had just stunned Chile: One nation’s natural disaster is another’s military opportunity. The earthquake, still the most powerful ever recorded, triggered mudslides, floods, tsunamis, even a volcanic eruption, leaving hundreds dead and thousands homeless. It sent 35-foot waves racing across the ocean at 450 miles per hour before smashing into Japan, Australia, and the Philippines. Nonetheless, says Jacob Darwin Hamblin in his book Arming Mother Nature, from their vantage point in Paris NATO leaders saw the seismic event “as a shining example of what Americans might soon implement against the Soviet Union.” If they could determine where to place a hydrogen bomb in the Earth’s crust, scientists thought they might be able to replicate what happened in the Pacific and cripple the Soviet state, all while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability.

NATO used the term environmental warfare for this new strategy—that is, harnessing nature’s physical forces and biological pathways to wage a global war. After opening his book with the unsettling Chile anecdote, Hamblin, who teaches the history of science and technology at Oregon State University, lays out a fascinating and often disturbing history of American efforts to enlist Mother Nature in the war against Communism. Under the guise of national security, he says, “military and civilian scientific work proceeded together.” Triggering earthquakes with subterranean explosions, controlling the weather with hydrogen bombs, introducing pathogens via air-dropped contaminated bird feathers—no scheme was too outlandish to contemplate. The government even conducted experiments on American civilian and military populations as well as on America’s enemies. In the context of war, anything could be morally justified.

The desire to control and manipulate nature on a massive scale—and the belief that doing so was viable—had emerged earlier, during World War II. American military leaders took note of how fires caused by incendiary bombs Allied forces had dropped on Japanese and German urban centers consumed city after city. Washington strategists contemplated using biochemical weapons on Japanese rice fields to deprive both civilians and soldiers of the primary staple of their diet. Ultimately they wanted to manipulate nature on the atomic level. Fearful that the Germans were developing an atomic bomb, the United States raced to develop one first. For the next half-century the desire to outpace the enemy in weapons development drove military doctrine and much scientific research. Says Hamblin, “Scientific growth after World War II owes its greatest debt to the U.S. armed services, which paid the lion’s share of the bill.”

Yet these atomic-era mushroom clouds came with a kind of silver lining for environmentalists. In time, the tireless search for vulnerabilities to exploit expanded and deepened our scientific understanding of nature. By the late 1950s, public questions arose about the human impact on the environment, leading eventually to predictions of environmental catastrophe. The data used by those in the international environmental movement came directly from military-funded research. Moreover, global climate change would not have been detected during the latter years of the 20th century without scientific projects funded by the U.S. Defense Department.

Arming Mother Nature is divided into three thematic sections that are loosely chronological. The first, “Pathways of Nature,” covers the brief period following World War II when the Americans were the only ones with nuclear arms but possessed so few that the military wanted other, less costly weapons of mass destruction (a phrase government officials tried to avoid using publicly then) to stem the rising tide of Communism. The military believed it required flexibility in how it might respond to the threat. Before the Soviets’ emergence as a nuclear power, a flexible response meant using biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. (As we’ll see, in the 1960s “flexible response” would take on a whole different meaning.) In addition to researching biological and radiological warfare, scientists strove to learn more about how disease becomes epidemic. Some initial experiments focused on crop destruction rather than on infecting crops with disease: Anti-livestock and anti-crop weapons seemed the most logical and cost-effective approach. Other researchers debated which pathogens to mass-produce and the best ways to spread them.

“Forces of Nature,” the second section, covers the first decade of the thermonuclear era. Research and policy as well as military strategy shifted with the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949. The blast triggered more questions: Could the United States wage and win a nuclear war? If not, how could the West defeat the Soviets and their allies? Manipulating nature became a major focus of strategic thinking, and the military dollars followed. Opinions within the nuclear research community were divided over the most effective use of a bomb: dropping a nuclear device directly on a city or introducing floods and wildfires by targeting dams and forests. Meanwhile, research into developing bigger and more powerful nuclear weapons had led some scientists to study nuclear fallout and its effects. As researchers learned more, their thinking turned increasingly toward using geophysical forces, such as oceans and winds, militarily. It was within this context that American defensive planners perceived opportunity in the aftermath of the 1960 Chile earthquake.

The third section, “Gatekeepers of Nature,” picks up around the time President Kennedy issued the military doctrine of Flexible Response, calling for a diversified nuclear arsenal as well as the use of small, specialized combat units such as the Army’s Special Forces. Many Americans believed, as Kennedy did, that science and technology could help win wars abroad while also solving problems such as hunger and disease at home. “Scientists,” Hamblin says, “were not merely asked to do research or to develop technology but to plan global strategy. That encouraged civilian scientists to think of the whole Earth as the playing field.” They used computers and game theory to develop models predicting the outcome of countless scenarios. Hamblin observes, “Military planning and environmental prediction were rarely far removed from each other, as they asked the same questions, drew from the same data, and often involved the same scientists.”

It is not surprising, then, that Americans learned of the environmental damage caused by nuclear testing and chemical spraying from scientists such as Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and Rachel Carson, who consulted military researchers’ data in their own work. At the time few realized that environmental scientists often drew on data and reports generated from projects funded by the Defense Department. In writings aimed at the general public, environmentalists discussed the planet’s future in catastrophic terms. That books like Carson’s Silent Spring and Erlich’s The Population Bomb became bestsellers reflected Americans’ growing concern over the environment in the 1960s.

The Vietnam War proved a turning point in the history of catastrophic environmentalism. In his chapter on the war, Hamblin examines how and why military and civilian scientists openly used Vietnam as a vast “playing field” for all manner of biochemical weapon research. Even the U.S. Forest Service got involved, loaning fire researchers to the Department of Defense, where they experimented with spraying defoliants and dropping incendiary bombs intended to consume swaths of jungle in massive forest fires. But soon the war abroad fueled widespread protest back home, and antiwar activism paved the way for environmental activism. By 1969 the environmental movement had grown powerful enough that American policy makers and diplomats needed to act if they were to maintain control of what was now a global issue. President Nixon pushed through robust environmental legislation and attempted to promote environmental issues through NATO, keeping the United States in a leadership position. Discussing ecological issues with the Soviets provided additional points of engagement besides nuclear disarmament and helped open a path for negotiating nonproliferation and arms-limitation treaties in the 1970s.

Although the relationship between scientists and military leaders transformed yet again in the face of new environmental challenges in the 1980s—the droughts in Africa, the global AIDS epidemic, and the scientific debate over climate change—and after the end of the Cold War, the connection that has existed between them since World War II remains today. Indeed, soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American policy makers, scientists, and defense experts began discussing how terrorists might use forest fires as a weapon on American soil and ways to defend against it.

As a strategy, environmental warfare went global decades ago, and now the temptation to arm Mother Nature may always be with us. Arming Mother Nature reminds us that we do so at our peril.

Click here to read the original review on the American Scientist website.

Everyone knows Smokey Bear, Woodsy Owl, and maybe even Ranger Rick Raccoon, but there are many other forest and forestry-related fictional characters that long ago fell by the wayside. Peeling Back the Bark‘s series on “Forgotten Characters from Forest History” continues with Part 15, in which we examine Joe Beaver.

Before there was a Smokey Bear or a Woodsy Owl, the U.S. Forest Service had another animal preaching the messages of forest conservation and fire prevention: Joe Beaver. Joe (an actual beaver, not the 8-time world champion cowboy) was the creation of legendary cartoonist Ed Nofziger, who worked for the Forest Service during World War II before moving on to the large animation studios of his day. The story of Joe Beaver’s creation is intertwined with Nofziger’s divergent career path into the world of forestry.

Ed Nofziger was born in 1913 and raised in California, graduating with an art degree from UCLA in 1936. His work as a cartoonist soon took him to New York, where he became a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post and other publications. The outbreak of World War II altered his career path, though, bringing him renown he might otherwise have never attained.

As a member of the pacifist Church of the Brethren, Nofziger was a conscientious objector during the war. When conscripted in 1943 he was assigned to the Forest Service as an alternative to military duty. Nofziger was first sent to a Forest Service station in Cooperstown, New York. Despite having no previous forestry experience (other than being the son of a West Coast lumberman), he took to the work and soon put his own unique skills to good use. Nofziger came up with the idea for Joe Beaver as a way to combine humor with a message of forest conservation.

The Joe Beaver cartoon first appeared in The Otsego Forest Cooperator, a publication of the Otsego Forest Products Cooperative Association in Cooperstown. The character was successfully received, and the Forest Service decided to promote the cartoon on a national level. In 1945 Nofziger was transferred to the USFS office in Philadelphia as Joe Beaver’s audience continued to grow. The Forest Service distributed the comic to lumber and trade journals and other publications throughout the country.

Dr. Hardy L. Shirley, the director of the Northeastern Forest Experiment Station for whom Nofziger worked in Philadelphia, described Joe Beaver as “a practical woodsman who is part philosopher, part forester and part hard-headed business man.”

Besides speaking, though, Joe Beaver didn’t take on other human characteristics like similar animal characters. Joe never wore clothes or a hard hat, for example (a la Benny Beaver and others). He was presented as a regular beaver living in the forest, dedicated to spreading the message of conservation.

Nofziger and the Joe Beaver character continued to get more publicity as the cartoon spread nationwide. The overseas service edition of Life magazine in August 1945 featured Joe Beaver cartoons in the “Speaking of Pictures” section. Life had this to say about Joe: “His toothy grin is not that of a clown; it comes, rather, from the bustling good spirits of someone trying to get a job done and done well. Joe is smart, practical and has the native pride of a skilled craftsman. Despite the sarcastic spoofing of his slow-witted beaver pals, Lumberman Joe feels a deep sense of responsibility and concern for their welfare, their sometimes crude work methods and, above all, for America’s forests.”

Feature articles on Nofziger and Joe also appeared in the New York Herald Tribune (September 9, 1945) and the Long Island Star-Journal (January 10, 1946), the latter of which declared: “A man who never studied a stump of forestry in his life, Nofziger is making the experts in timber conservation all over the country sit up and take notice–and all with the air of one who feels he hasn’t done enough.”

Despite this success, Nofziger never received any extra income for the Joe Beaver character, who was officially owned by the Forest Service. This didn’t bother him. “Joe is trying to do a service for the people of this country and better forestry,” Nofziger stated in an interview. “He does not contribute to my family income. He is a public service. He is given away free.”

While with the Forest Service, Nofziger also completed the short book Two Trees, created from hand-carved linoleum prints. This story of two trees named Ashton and Elmer provided a message to children of the importance of proper forest management.

Nofziger kept turning out Joe Beaver cartoons through the end of the 1940s. His career aspirations eventually led him back to California. He moved on from the Forest Service and into full time animation, working for UPA studios drawing “Mister Magoo” cartoons and later for Hanna-Barbera where he drew “Ruff and Ready” and other characters. (While at Hanna-Barbera he may have been involved with the Sniff and Snuff characters, but we don’t have confirmation of that.)

Nofziger passed away on October 16, 2000. In his obituary published in the Los Angeles Times, fellow artist Roger Armstrong praised him as one of “the finest cartoonist of animals in the last half-century.”

Continue after the jump below for a small selection of classic Joe Beaver cartoons.

What began as a millionaire’s dream, a genius’s vision, and a forester’s labor is now being captured in a Forest History Society documentary film. This spring the Forest History Society joined forces with Bonesteel Films to produce First in Forestry, a documentary film about Carl Alwin Schenck and the Biltmore Forest School. Principal photography for the interviews and re-creation footage began in earnest last month, and yours truly was there to witness the excitement and action, consult a bit, and try to look like I know what I am doing.

For those not familiar with our story, George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, is where the first large-scale forest management effort was carried out in the United States under the direction of Gifford Pinchot and Carl Schenck. Schenck also established the first school of forestry in North America. Several of the nearly 400 men who graduated from his school went on to become leaders in American forestry in the first half of the 20th century. Much of the land they worked and learned on is now preserved as the Pisgah National Forest. The story of Carl Schenck and his work at the Biltmore is the focus of the film.

The view from the Blue Ridge Parkway towards where the Biltmore Forest School spent the summer months. George Vanderbilt owned much of what is visible from there. (Jamie Lewis)

Director Paul Bonesteel strongly believes that including re-creation footage will draw in today’s audiences, and we couldn’t agree more. He used this technique with great success in two other films that have aired on PBS, The Mystery of George Masa and The Day Carl Sandburg Died.

Critical to that success is finding the right actors to portray historical figures, in this case, finding forester Carl Schenck (not Finding Forrester).

“Dr. Schenck” keeps a close eye on “his boys” during a break in filming while director Paul Bonesteel checks the playback. (Courtesy of Bonesteel Films)

Here’s an example of acting like I know what I’m doing: showing Paul (left) and “Dr. Schenck” (right) the proper height to hold a Biltmore stick. The rumors reported on Entertainment Tonight about my having punched out Paul over creative differences are incorrect. (Courtesy of Bonesteel Films)

Paul gives “Dr. Schenck” direction for his next scene. The rumor reported in the press in 1909 that Dr. Schenck punched out estate manager C.D. Beadle is, sadly, true. (Courtesy of Bonesteel films)

We are fortunate to have the cooperation of the U.S. Forest Service and the Cradle of Forestry National Historic Site in making the filming possible. We’re using locations found throughout the Pisgah National Forest and at the Cradle of Forestry.

No shot is too difficult for the Bonesteel team to capture. They even set up a camera in a cold mountain stream to get just the right angle. No animals or camera crew were hurt in the taking of this photograph. (Courtesy of Bonesteel Films)

As you might imagine, it takes a number of talented people behind the scenes to make the action in front of the camera look good and convincing. The folks at Bonesteel Films are top-notch and really pleasant to work with. Early calls and long days don’t dampen spirits. Not even a relentless rain storm stopped our filming interviews one day. We just moved to a new location. Fortunately, when it was time for shooting re-creation footage in the forest we had good weather.

We needed people for wardrobe and makeup, wrangling horses, checking the script, and coordinating the two cameras. (Courtesy of Bonesteel Films)

One of the things that excites us about working with Bonesteel Films is Paul’s skill in mixing traditional documentary film-making style (historical photographs and interviews with historians) with re-creation footage that works like a historical photograph brought to life. But without good interviews, the film could suffer. So we brought in one of the best at on-screen interviews, Char Miller. You may know him from such films as The Greatest Good and The Wilderness Idea.

Pinchot biographer Char Miller will be one of the featured interviews. Here Char (right) takes a break from being interviewed to pose with yours truly and Paul. Rumors reported on Entertainment Tonight that I got in a fight with Char and Paul over sartorial differences are not true. (Courtesy of Bonesteel Films)

Not all of the film will be “talking heads” and re-creation footage. This is not just a story of the people, but the story of the place. The Pisgah region and the Southern Appalachians are one of the most beautiful places in the world in my opinion. You can’t ask for a better backdrop for filming. It’s why so many Hollywood films are made there, too.

The area around Asheville is known as “The Land of the Sky” and with good reason. Here’s the view from the Blue Ridge Parkway. (Jamie Lewis)

For a few months now, whenever he gets a chance, Paul has been shooting footage that will capture and convey that beauty. He has plenty of experience doing so because of his film about George Masa and commercial work for the Biltmore Estate.

Paul works both on the micro and macro levels when it comes to capturing nature on film.  (Courtesy of Bonesteel Films)

One of the things you often hear about with actors and film sets is how groupies sneak on to the set to watch filming. I’m hear to tell you it’s true. We’re going to beef up security for the next round of filming. We can’t allow set crashers who then peddle gossip to the tabloids.

We eventually had security remove this interloper from the set. We think he’s the source of the rumors in the press of fisticuffs and tantrums. (Jamie Lewis)

If you’ve read this far, thank you! If you want to be a part of forest history, we’re still fundraising for the film. Please visit our film page to learn how you can contribute, and stay tuned for more news on the film.

Last Friday we received word that Bill Hagenstein, a giant in the forest industry and the history of American forestry, had died. The following biography is adapted from the files of the World Forestry Center, which he helped to establish in Portland, Oregon. While it does a fine job of summarizing his life and career, it doesn’t begin to capture what a character Bill was. He never varnished the truth and was known for his direct, if profanity-laced, take on forestry and life, both of which are evident in his two oral history interviews with FHS and his colorful memoir Cork & Suspenders: Memoir of an Early Forester. As you’ll see he may very well have been the last living link we had to the first generation of American foresters. 

One of the most important American and Northwestern foresters in the twentieth century, William D. “Bill” Hagenstein was a key advocate for sound national and regional forestry policies that protected forests and ensured their continuing productivity. In addition to participating in the creation of the nationwide Tree Farm Program and pioneering other sustainable forestry practices, Bill provided expert testimony to the Oregon and Washington legislatures and the Congress for more than 30 years.

Bill Hagenstein, in an undated photo from the FHS Photo Collection

A fourth generation Northwesterner, Bill was born in Seattle on March 8, 1915. When Bill was eleven, his father, Charles William Hagenstein, passed away and his upbringing was left to his mother, Janet May Hagenstein (née Finigan). Bill began working in the woods at age 12. Already six feet tall and 170 pounds, Bill was able to pass for 18, the minimum age required for logging by state law. Throughout his teens, Bill worked every summer in logging camps and by the time he was 19 he held his first foreman’s job.

As the Great Depression set in, Bill traveled the country on freight cars between jobs in logging camps. In the early 1930s, he worked on several major forest fires in Idaho. These experiences educated him about the devastation that forest fires can cause without efforts to prevent and control them.

In the fall of 1934, Bill returned to his mother’s house in Seattle after spending the summer on the disastrous Pete King fire on Idaho’s Selway National Forest. He had been out of high school for four years and his mother encouraged him to enroll in the University of Washington, just four miles away from where he was born. At enrollment, a woman at the registrar’s office rattled off an alphabetical list of possible majors. When she got to “f” Bill stopped her and selected forestry.

Bill received his Bachelor of Science in Forestry in 1938. He had spent the summers working for the U.S. Forest Service and the Seattle Water Department. That year forestry employment was hard to come by, but Bill worked several jobs. First he was a fire warden for the City of Seattle on its Cedar River Watershed. Then he worked as a forest entomologist for the U.S. Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine in northern California. Bill spent 1939 as a logging superintendent and engineer for the Eagle Logging Company in Skagit County, Washington. In 1940 he spent a few months as a foreman in a CCC Camp on the Snoqualmie National Forest.

Spurred by his desire to see another part of the country—especially another major timber-producing area—Bill enrolled as a scholarship student in Duke University’s School of Forestry, from which he received the Master of Forestry degree in 1941. The West Coast Lumbermen’s Association (WCLA) immediately employed him as Forester for Western Washington.

On January 20, 1942, Bill participated in the historic founding of the American Tree Farm System. Thirteen men, including prominent Northwest lumbermen and foresters, met in the old Portland Hotel and certified the country’s first tree farms. Bill was secretary of the meeting and signed its minutes. Tree farms were certified when their owners pledged to dedicate their lands permanently to growing, protecting, and harvesting trees for permanent production. Bill considered his part in this program, which spread quickly throughout the United States, to be one of the crowning achievements of his life.

Bill Hagenstein (third from right) considered his involvement in the founding of the American Tree Farm System “one of the crowning achievements of his life.”

Col. William B. Greeley, then Secretary-Manager of WCLA, and former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, was also present at the founding of the Tree Farm System. Colonel Greeley was Bill’s closest professional colleague and mentor for fifteen years. (Ed: Bill always spoke reverently and respectfully of “the Colonel” and maintained a friendship with the Greeley family the rest of his life.)

In 1943, World War II took Bill to the South and Central Pacific. He served as Chief Engineer of military lumbering in those theaters of war. Though often overlooked, timber was critical to the war effort. Lumber was needed for tent framing and decking, docks and wharves, bridges, hospitals, and dunnage for loading supply ships. In 1945, as the war was winding down, Bill was sent to Costa Rica to help establish a cinchona (quinine) plantation to grow the bark needed for producing the drug used to treat malaria.

After the war, Bill returned to WCLA, which moved its headquarters in 1946 from Seattle to Portland. In 1947, after a change in Washington law, Bill qualified as a Professional Engineer in Logging Engineering. Upon his move to Oregon he was similarly licensed in that state. Bill became the organization’s Chief Forester in 1948. In 1949 WCLA created a new organization that focused entirely on forestry and called it the Industrial Forestry Association (IFA). Bill was named manager and later, when the organization officially incorporated, was elected Executive Vice President. Bill held that position until his retirement in 1980.

At IFA’s peak, Bill had approximately 300 people working with him, including a professional forestry staff of 20. IFA’s mission was to develop a permanent timber supply in the Douglas-fir region as basic support for the Northwest economy. In addition to certifying tree farms in the Douglas-fir region, IFA operated four nonprofit nurseries, which grew trees for member companies. By 1980 the IFA nurseries had grown 500 million trees, which reforested one million acres on tree farms in western Washington and Oregon. In 1954 IFA started the first regional program of tree improvement to apply the principles of genetics to the growing of timber. This is now standard practice by industry and government.

Among IFA’s most important tasks was professional expression of the needs of forestry to the public and every level of government. Over a 35-year period, Bill provided expert testimony to agencies and Congress on about 250 occasions. One of IFA’s strengths was its credibility on all aspects of Northwest forestry. Eventually, Bill and IFA became the principal national voice for the Douglas-fir industry.

Bill joined the Society of American Foresters in 1938 and served this professional society in many ways, including seven years as associate editor of the Journal of Forestry, ten years on its Governing Council, and four years as President from 1966 to 1969. He was elected a Fellow in 1963 and was awarded the Society’s Gifford Pinchot medal in 1987.

He served as a regional leader in times of crisis. As chairman of the Timber Disaster Committee of the Northwest Forest Pest Action Council, he led the salvage efforts to clean up the mess created by the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 that blew down 17 billion board feet of timber in five hours. This effort greatly minimized the proliferation of pests and forest fires that could have seriously damaged the region’s economy.

Bill was active in the forest fire prevention campaigns of the Keep Washington Green and Keep Oregon Green Associations from their inception in the early 1940s. He served the Washington association as an Advisory Trustee from 1957 to 1995 and the Oregon association as Trustee from 1957 on and as President in 1972–73.

A tireless promoter of forestry, Bill wrote more than 500 published pieces in a variety of media. He coauthored with Wackerman and Mitchell the textbook, Harvesting Timber Crops, widely used by forestry schools throughout the world. He delivered a speech every 10 working days for 35 years. In addition to appearing before professional and civic groups, Bill delivered lectures at universities in California, North Carolina, Missouri, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Bill was a member of numerous professional associations and received many awards and honors.

From a Portland hilltop, Bill witnessed the burning of the city’s magnificent Forestry Building in 1964, a massive wood structure that had been a cornerstone of the Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905. In response to the absence left by this fire, Mayor Terry Schrunk appointed Bill and ten others as founders and builders of the Western Forestry Center, now the World Forestry Center.

Bill’s varied career brought him in touch with many forestry luminaries. In 1940, when he was attending his first annual meeting of the Society of American Foresters in Washington, DC, Bill met and had lunch with Gifford Pinchot, America’s first forester and one of seven founders of the Society in 1900. Bill met five of the other founders at subsequent annual meetings.

Bill retired from IFA in 1980. With no interest in retirement, he incorporated W. D. Hagenstein and Associates and continued working as a consulting forester for many more years. As his résumé shows, he was active in several organizations, including serving on the Forest History Society’s Board of Directors from 2001 to 2004, and the recipient of numerous achievement awards.

For more than 70 years, Bill made the woods his profession and his passion. He once said that dendrology—the study of trees—was his hobby. Bill was also a devoted husband.  His wife of nearly 40 years, Ruth Helen Hagenstein (née Johnson) passed away in 1979. Bill married Jean Kraemer Edson in 1980. She passed away in 2000.

Bill devoted both his professional and personal life to promoting forestry as the foundation of the Northwest economy because of the unique renewability of trees. He always emphasized that we must take good care of our forests and, in doing so, they will take good care of us. For Bill Hagenstein this responsibility meant cherishing our forests by using their bounty wisely and renewing them promptly by the practice of forestry.

The International Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo is the country’s oldest fraternal organization. Formed in 1892 at a train station in rural Arkansas almost as a lark (and possibly while under the influence of alcohol), the idea of a fraternal organization for the timber and lumber industries founded on the ideals of fellowship and goodwill quickly caught on. Soon chapters could be found all over the United States.

The black cat with its tail curled into the number 9 is the Hoo-Hoo mascot. It flies in the face of superstition and harkens back to the ancient Egyptians, who worshiped the cat as a deity.

While it’s easy to not take the organization seriously in part because the founders adopted their nomenclature from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” and they do know how to have a good time, the Hoo-Hoos of today are little different from members a century ago: they are folks who care deeply about their industry and each other. Early proof of that fraternal bond quickly emerged in the days following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Shortly after the earthquake hit on the morning of April 18, 1906, the news flashed around the country of the catastrophe via telegraph. The earthquake had done its share of damage, but the fires that erupted in the aftermath laid waste to significant portions of the city. Lumber yards and wood products businesses were particularly vulnerable to the fires, of course. Communication in and out of the area was spotty and slow. In Nashville, where the Hoo-Hoo organization was then headquartered, in the Office of Supreme Scrivenoter (Editor) J. H. Baird, they anxiously awaited word from San Francisco. Fortunately for us, Baird sifted through and preserved a good portion of the correspondence in an article published in the May 1906 issue of the organization’s newsletter The Bulletin.

On April 24, Vicegerent Frank Trower in San Francisco telegrammed: “Disaster by earthquake and fire too awful for description has prostrated San Francisco and many interior towns. Three hundred thousand people homeless and destitute. Immediate help sorely needed. Many Hoo-Hoo lost business and homes—everything except their grit. This is the time for brothers to show true spirit of fraternity by temporary relief. Will you help us? Wire me at 1238 Filbert Street, Oakland.” Along with many other businessmen Trower had relocated to Oakland because he had lost his lumber business in the fire that followed the earthquake.

The Mission District burning. [Photographer: Chadwick, H. D. (US Gov War Department. Office of the Chief Signal Officer.) - US Archiv ARCWEB ARC Identifier: 524395 NARA National Archives and Records Administration]

“Dear Brother Baird: I am confiscating a few moments’ time to write you regarding conditions here one week after the great earthquake and fire. The experiences and emotions of a lifetime have been crowded into that short week. It is very hard to realize that the beloved San Francisco of former times we shall know no more. Today she is still a splendid city—splendid in her ruins….

Now a few words as to our local Hoo-Hoo and how they have fared. I wired you on the 20th saying that many of our Hoo-Hoo had their business and homes ruined, and asked if our Order would not give them temporary assistance. So far I have not had an answer to this message. I have met several of our members in this situation and there are doubtless many more. It is difficult for us just now to find each other, but I am advertising in the local papers, giving my new address and asking all Hoo-Hoo needing temporary assistance to call on me. What we want is to help our members to help themselves. I am sure that most of them will later repay any relief given now. We do not want charity, but only a little help for the time being, until we can get on our feet. I feel this is the time for our brothers to show a true fraternal spirit. You may be sure any help extended us will be carefully handled, and if there is any balance remaining it will be returned to you for the Imminent Distress Fund or for such other use as the Supreme Nine may decide to make of it.”

Baird received another letter from Trower on May 1:

“Many of our members have suffered heavy financial losses. You can easily understand this when I tell you that about one-half of the lumber yards in San Francisco are gone, all of the hotel district, about one-half of the planing mills and practically all of the sawmill and machinery supply houses…. Brother Baird, it would warm the cockles of your heart to see how our people have accepted their fearful losses without a whimper. Our boys out here are pure grit, and the women, God bless them, are pure gold, and they are all standing by the city, working cheerfully to put it once again in its imperial position.”

Other Hoo-Hoos were writing Baird as well, and so he published those letters in this same article. Arthur White wrote to convey his experiences the day of the earthquake, which makes for a very riveting letter. But I wanted to share this little tidbit. The next time you’re having a tough day at work, you might want to remember this. Recall that the quake hit at 5:18 in the morning. That afternoon, White wrote, “Premature births began. I was told that in one lumber yard in the south end of town forty-two children were born before Friday morning. I did not see this but I have every reason to believe it.”

In the days immediately following the disaster, Trower and the others initially didn’t know that cities and people around the country were organizing relief efforts. In another letter to Baird he wrote: “I think our members here never realized before the strong bond of fraternity between us and our brethren in other parts of the country. We have had many expressions of sympathy and good cheer, and your prompt offer of financial assistance impressed upon us profoundly the fact that while ours is not a benefit order, yet we will not allow any member to be in imminent distress without coming to his aid.”

Trower formed a Hoo-Hoo relief committee to do several things, including securing employment for members. Naturally, there were nine members of the committee. In this time of crisis, being part of the organization brought some solace to Trower and the others in the Bay Area. After a bit of time had passed, maybe just a few weeks or so, he wrote Baird again, saying:

“Please send me the latest handbook and such supplements as may be out, as I have no list of our members here. Our faithful old Hoo-Hoo trunk with all the apparatus and the Sacred Black Cat is no more. They did their duty well. Peace to their ashes. Will you kindly send me the new supply of Hoo-Hoo material of all kinds as soon as convenient? I am anxious to hold another concatenation in the near future, either in the San Joaquin Valley, probably at Fresno, or in the San Francisco Bay section. Another good, old time initiation will make us feel at home again.”

I’ll give Scrivenoter Baird the last word on this. At the end of the article, he wrote:

“All of the foregoing is but a meager outline of conditions in San Francisco, but it serves to show that Hoo-Hoo is far from an order devoted merely to promoting what is known as ‘a good time’ on the part of its members. The returns from the call sent out for aid are still coming in, and the hundreds of letters received at this office are truly an inspiration, proving that the Order does truly typify the universal brotherhood of men.”

***

I recently spoke at the annual Hoo-Hoo international convention and shared the above with the members in my talk. This year’s gathering was held just north of San Francisco in Santa Rosa. While at the convention, though, I heard echoes of 1906. Ironically, a small quake had hit the region just a few weeks before. Some members couldn’t attend because they were dealing with earthquake damage or contending with wildfires that were threatening their homes. There was some concerned discussion about those not in attendance because of natural disaster, as well as conversations and commiseration about the challenges many of these business owners face in a volatile lumber market. I also saw many displays of friendship and fraternity that transcended international boundaries—the Aussies and Kiwis evidently had been coming for years, judging by the camaraderie between them and the Americans and Canadians. I witnessed the inauguration of their first woman Grand Snark of the Universe, Mary Beth Moynihan, who was clearly beloved and respected. The “universal brotherhood of men” will now be led by a woman. In short, I can attest that nearly 110 years later, the Hoo-Hoo continue to inspire and that the feelings of goodwill and fellowship are strong.

Read a first-person account of the recovery efforts launched by the U.S. Forest Service in the aftermath of the earthquake in the 2006 issue of Forest History Today in Pamela Connor’s “A First-hand Report Concerning the Fire and Earthquake Situation in San Francisco, 1906″ and see photos of the city after the fires in our digital online exhibit “Redwood in the San Francisco Fire.”

The debate can now be settled. We know what the greatest championship series in baseball history is. It’s certainly not the 2014 San Francisco-Kansas City match-up, though that’s been entertaining.

What championship am I talking about? The year was 1908. Theodore “Big Stick” Roosevelt was finishing his second term as president. “Big Bill” Taft was running on the Republican ticket to succeed his friend and was taking on William Jennings Bryan, aka “The Great Commoner.” (This may have been the Progressive Era, but it was also the era of the best sports nicknames. Who could ever forget players like “Wee Willie” McGill, “Handsome” Griffin, or “Postscript” Fletcher? Even the head umpire of the series was nicknamed “Dusty”!)

The teams hailed from Chicago and Indianapolis and met on a sun-baked field in Michigan City, Indiana, for the first game. It had all the trappings of the modern game: two teams loaded with stars, four umpires, clean uniforms. See for yourself.

Oh, did I mention that this was the Hoo-Hoo‘s World Series? After all, lumber mills were big sponsors of teams back then. Nevertheless, there were bragging rights on the line. We’ll let our intrepid reporter take it from here:

At 1 o’clock the invading army of black cats took Michigan City without a struggle, the natives firing only one shot, that being from the artillery of a photographer. Immediately upon the landing of the steamer a brass band headed the line and the cavalcade proceeded to the park, where it was successfully photographed, and then steered to a great refreshment hall, where it was very successfully fed. The local accommodations for caring for the big crowd were found to be excellent and the hunger of all was satisfied without serious difficulty.

The chief event of the afternoon was the baseball game. Immediately after the luncheon the Hoo-Hoo and their ladies proceeded in a body to the b.p., meaning not baseball park but boiling point. The Northern Indiana penitentiary formed an appropriate background to this travesty on a baseball field. The sun turned all its calcium effects upon two inches of red hot sand, in which the athletes were compelled to disport themselves. The game itself was a contest between two teams selected from the lumbermen of Indianapolis and Chicago. They were made up as follows:

Two more formidable teams have never taken the field to battle for a title.

Just before the teams took the field E. F. Dodge, of Chicago, called [umpires] C. D. Rourke, of Urbana, Ill., and George Palmer, of Indianapolis, Ind., to the plate and presented one with a horse pistol and the other with a shotgun. Some of the decisions later proved that this was a wise precaution, undoubtedly saving both umpires from the fury of the populace.

Indianapolis won the game in the first inning, the Chicago team going up in the aeroplane a la Wright Bros. The procession of Indianapolis runs took ten minutes to pass a given point.

Pitcher Fox appeared to be a stranger in the neighborhood and was unable to locate the plate. He gave Mercer and Geisel, the first two men up, passes to first, and then Johnson started a grounder to first, which got through Saye’s legs and caromed into right field, Mercer and Geisel scoring. Avery struck out, but a passed ball assisted Johnson to third, from which he scored when Pritchard singled. Pritchard stole third, but expired there on infield outs of West and Maas.

In the third inning Giesel drew a base on balls, but was forced at second, McGill to Larson, on Johnson’s grounder. Avery’s single advanced Johnson a base and he scored when Lewis threw over Fletcher’s head. Pritchard grounded, McGill to Saye. West struck out.

Chicago got its lone tally in this inning and might have had more but for some bad base running. Larson opened with a beautiful two-base hit and went to third on a wild pitch. Matthias struck out, but Dodge singled through the box, scoring Larson. When Fletcher flied to Mercer, Dodge led away off and was easily doubled, Mercer to Pritchard.

During the four succeeding innings the two teams played airtight baseball, but thirteen Indianapolis men and twelve Chicago men going to bat. Fox opened the fifth inning with a single, but was nailed at second when he attempted to steal with the ball in the pitcher’s hands. Hamilton singled in the seventh with two out and was left at first.

The fielding features of the game were supplied by Fox, McGill, and Pritchard. W. H. Johnson, who besides being a good ball player is president of the Indiana Retail Lumber Dealers’ Association, gave a fine exhibition of backstopping. Wee Willie McGill accepted three chances at second without error. Postscript Fletcher did not have a chance at third, or undoubtedly would be included in the special mention column. The managing of Handsome Griffin was also a conspicuous feature. The score:

Immediately after the ball game the Hoo-Hoo and their ladies, many of whom had entertained themselves about Michigan City rather than swelter at the ball park or approach so dangerously close to the penitentiary, again boarded the [steamer] Theodore Roosevelt and enjoyed a beautiful twilight and moonlight trip homeward to Chicago. On the way they were entertained with music by talented vocalists and with explanations from members of the Chicago team.

That’s right. The Chicago players spent part of the trip home making excuses for the loss. I wonder what they said after Game 2, played ten days later in Indianapolis.

The losers from Chicago.

Because once again, the Windy City Boys turned in a poor performance, this time getting shellacked 23-3, committing 12 errors, and not scoring their first run until the 7th inning. Let’s go back to our reporter, who appears to be making excuses for the Chicagoans:

Because of the wide difference in the score there was not much excitement, but what the game lacked in excitement was made up in fun. The local team is composed largely of big men who do not often indulge in such exertion as playing ball, most of them being office men. Until noon Monday part of the local team had not reported at their offices for work.

The victorious team from Indianapolis.

The third and final game was played in Chicago. By then, the Hoosiers had already won the 3-game series, so their incentive to play all-out was not very great. Still, Chicago had to rally from 3 runs down to win 8-4.

A week later the Chicago Cubs won their last World Series title. Perhaps instead of a billy goat, their fans should bring a black cat to Wrigley Field to break the curse.

What we like to think might have been the pennant won by the Hoosiers!

Chicago’s not-so-lovable losers.

From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, lecturers often used glass lantern slides to illustrate their topics. Photographs were copied onto glass plates to make the slides, which would then be used with a projector to cast images onto walls or large screens. First developed in 1849, this process allowed for large groups of people to view photographs at the same time. This new technology was a no-brainer for lecturers. Large audiences now had a visual aid, one that was oftentimes further enhanced through color. Professional colorists hand-tinted the slides, producing colorized photos long before the invention of color film.

Lantern slide depicting a stand of mixed hardwoods and softwoods, Cheat River watershed, West Virginia, 1923.

FHS houses a set of such slides in the Duke University School of Forestry Lantern Slide Collection, a portion of which was recently digitized. These slides were collected by Clarence F. Korstian (1889–1968), a seminal figure in the history of forestry education both in North Carolina and nationwide. Korstian used the slides to accompany lectures during his tenure at Duke University from 1930 to 1959.

Korstian standing in open stand of timber in Craven County, NC, 1927.

Born and raised in Nebraska, Korstian spent the majority of his career in North Carolina. He served two decades with the U.S. Forest Service, about half of that at the Appalachian Forest Experiment Station in Asheville. He left the agency in 1930 to take a job at Duke as both a professor of silviculture and director of the Duke Forest. At Duke, Korstian organized a graduate school of forestry and served as the school’s first dean when it opened in the fall of 1938. He was instrumental in developing one of the nation’s leading forestry programs during his tenure, while also managing and expanding Duke Forest.

Duke Forest vehicle traveling on bridge over New Hope Creek in Durham, NC, 1930s.

The lantern slides Korstian collected to illustrate his forestry lectures come from at least 36 different states and several countries. Some of the photographs were taken by Korstian during his time with the Forest Service. The collection also includes photos from a trip he took to Europe to visit forestry schools in Germany, Switzerland, and France in the summer of 1932. The majority of slides in the collection are hand-colored, and as a whole they provide a unique look at forestry practices of the time as well as photographic technology.

Dr. Hans Mayer-Wegelin, Forstassessor Petri, and Prof. Joshua Alban Cope on forest road in Bramwald Staatsoberforsterei. Hann-Munden, Germany, 1932.

By the 1940s, 35mm Kodachrome slides began to take over as the preferred method for publicly showcasing photographs. Lantern slide use all but disappeared by the late 1950s. This was also around the same time that Korstian’s own career was winding down. He relinquished the deanship in 1957, and fully retired two years later. Following his retirement in 1959, one of the major divisions of Duke Forest was named in his honor.

Over 100 of the 900 slides in the collection have so far been digitized and can now be accessed online via the FHS image database. You can view more selections from the collection below, and see the collection’s finding aid for additional information. To learn more about Korstian, read the oral history interview Clarence F. Korstian: Forty Years of Forestry conducted by Elwood Maunder in 1959.

Second growth oaks, damaged at the base by fires. Pisgah National Forest, 1927.

Steam skidder in a gum swamp, Dismal Swamp area, NC, 1922.

Kudzu vines planted to control erosion, Tennessee, 1930.

Chestnut trees at Greenwich Park, England.

Virgin forest, chiefly spruce, at high elevation with rhododendron undergrowth, NC, 1900.

The silence, once I recognized it, struck me as odd, but then it made sense. I’ve been in louder empty churches, an apt analogy because I was here to pay my respects to the late, great man. I stood alone in the natural cathedral. The giant trees reminded me of the Corinthian columns that supported the roof of my childhood church—too big to wrap my arms around and requiring that I tilt my head all the way back to see the decorative capital of flowers and leaves. The top of the coastal redwoods and giant sequoias have their own version. I moved about the trail of marked trees silently so as not to disturb the named sentinels that guard the grove. It seemed silly because I was alone but it made all the sense in the world because of the reverence I feel for those honored here: Olmsted, Sargent, Vanderbilt, Pinchot, Fernow, and sixteen other founding fathers of the American forestry movement. They are the men that I have shared my life with, for a quarter of a century now, having spent countless hours studying, questioning, challenging, and arguing with and about them. But I had come to pay tribute to the man for whom the redwood grove is named and who had selected the trees that bore their names: Carl Alwin Schenck.

How is it that a redwood grove in northern California is named for a German forester who had barely stepped foot in these woods until he came here on July 4, 1951, for the dedication ceremony in his honor? He would have told you the answer is “love.” The love Schenck’s former students felt for him, and he them. Schenck’s saying that “Forestry is a good thing but love is better” is inscribed on the commemorative marker. Actually it tells us that “the alumni, his friends and admirers . . . have caused these trees to be designated in his honor as a mark of their affection for him and their devotion to his leadership and his teaching.” In mid-20th century America “affection” was an acceptable term for men to use when saying they loved one another. The word really harkened back to their youth, when they trailed through the forest behind Schenck like so many flannelled fledglings. But the inclusion of Schenck’s quotation tells you it was more than affection. “Affection” stands for many other things: “admiration,” “respect,” “friendship.” But most of all “love.”

“Have caused these trees” is an interesting choice of language. They—the alumni, “his boys” as he called them—had been his cause while he was their teacher. He taught them forestry, for sure, but taught them to be men, to drink beer around the campfire, and to drink deeply from the well of life. To know the great philosophers and the Bible. To know their oaks from their maples. To know that good forestry meant good roads. They in turn had made him their cause, to bring him back to the United States following World War II, to show him that they had become the men he expected them to be and had done the great things he prepared them to do. The last tree named is in their honor: “All Schenck’s Old Boys of The Biltmore School.”

***

The Carl Alwin Schenck Grove is in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in northern California. It’s named for Dr. Carl Alwin Schenck (1868–1955), the chief forester of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, and founder of the Biltmore Forest School, the first school of forestry in North America (1898–1913). The grove was dedicated on July 4, 1951, by Schenck in a ceremony attended by his former students, friends, and local dignitaries.

Schenck operated the school from 1898 to 1909 on the estate before he was dismissed by the owner, George Vanderbilt. Schenck then spent the next four years traveling with his students throughout the United States and Europe examining working fields and lumber operations before shuttering the school and returning to his native Germany by 1914. One of the many honors bestowed upon Schenck for his pioneering work in American forestry was having a grove named for him through a program operated by the Save-the-Redwoods League and the California State Park Commission.

The event was just one of several stops on a grand tour of the United States in 1951. The tour, sponsored by the American Forestry Association (now American Forests) and the school alumni, is captured in a limited edition book Trees for the Great: Honoring Carl Alwin Schenck. The book includes a phonograph recording recreating the redwood grove ceremony, complete with songs performed at the event and Dr. Schenck giving his speech in which he lists those he wished to honor with named trees. (You can listen to the mp3 version of it here.) It also includes reprints of articles from Newsweek magazine and The New Yorker Magazine.

The grove has two trail loops with numbered markers bearing the names of founders of the American forestry movement as selected by Schenck and one dedicated to his former students. Markers are still visible for (in sequential order) Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., Charles Sprague Sargent, George W. Vanderbilt, Gifford Pinchot, Sir Dietrich Brandis, Carl Schurz, John Sterling Morton, John Aston Warder, Nathaniel Egleston, Bernhard Fernow, Joseph T. Rothrock, Filibert Roth, Samuel B. Green, Dr. Homer D. House, and Dr. Clifford Durant Howe. (House and Howe taught at the Biltmore School.) Five markers are missing. It is hard to determine what names they bore because of some discrepancies between the names recorded at the time Schenck announced them in 1951 and the standing markers. The Save the Redwoods League is in the process of digitizing all their files relating to their many memorial groves.

The grove is located off the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway, approximately 8 miles north of Orick, California, off U.S. Highway 101. To reach the grove, park on the road at the Brown Creek Trail trailhead. Begin the 1.3-mile walk by going 0.2 miles east on the groomed dirt path to the trail junction. Turn left (north), staying on Brown Creek Trail and heading away from South Fork Trail. The footbridge to Schenck Grove is about 1.1 miles north of the junction. At the other side of the bridge sits the marker unveiled at the dedication. Allow at least three hours total to hike there and back and for exploring the grove.

“CAS” indicates the location of the Schenck Grove. “FLO” is the Frederick Law Olmsted Grove. The map is from the “Trail Map of Redwood National and State Parks” (Redwood Hikes Press, 2013)

Just on the other side of the bridge in Schenck Grove on the left you’ll find the marker and where the ceremony took place in 1951.

The marker was dramatically lit by the sun when I arrived, as if Dr. Schenck wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it. Click the photo so you can read the inscription.

Though the path is easy to walk, markers are subject to the whims of nature such as plant growth or fallen trees. The marker for the “Old Boys of The Biltmore School” is in the foreground.

Dr. Schenck at the marker after its unveiling. The tablet appears to be made of wood. The one there today is made of metal (see above).

Dr. Schenck delivering his speech as some former students and dignitaries listen.

Everyone knows Smokey Bear, Woodsy Owl, and maybe even Ranger Rick Raccoon, but there are many other forest and forestry-related fictional characters that long ago fell by the wayside. Peeling Back the Bark‘s series on “Forgotten Characters from Forest History” continues with Part 16, in which we examine Tim Burr.

In July 1949 the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company debuted the first issue of its new company-wide magazine. Weyerhaeuser Magazine was targeted to company employees and featured company news across the various branches, as well as features on Weyerhaeuser employees both on the job and away from work. The inaugural issue of the magazine also introduced to the world a brilliantly-named character: Mr. Tim Burr.

Tim’s purpose was to promote workplace safety, similar to previously profiled characters like Herman I. Cautious and Paula Bunyan. But unlike Herman and Paula, who were committed examples of proper workplace behavior, Tim was a bit more of a daydreaming klutz. While a good-natured worker, Tim continually ran into trouble while on the job.

The brief item announcing his introduction in Weyerhaeuser Magazine describes him as follows: “It’s not that he isn’t a good worker—he is. The unfortunate thing about Tim is that he’s a dope when it comes to safety.”

In his first appearance, Tim falls down the stairs at work while dreaming of an upcoming vacation. In subsequent appearances he gets stuck in sawmill machinery, runs into trouble while self-administering first aid, forgets to wear a gas mask at an inopportune moment, and gets hit by a falling tree. The five-panel Tim Burr comic strips always ended with Tim either in the infirmary or covered in bandages (usually both).

First two panels of first-ever Tim Burr comic (July 1949). Click to view full strip.

The Tim Burr comics were drawn by artist Jack Keeler, who spent much of his early career in the Pacific Northwest. Thanks to some information provided by Keeler’s grand-nephew we now know a lot more about the artist’s life and work.

Keeler was born in Wyoming in 1923 but moved with his family a few years later to Everett, Washington. In the early 1940s he attended the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Following service in World War II, Keeler went to work as a comic artist. His work appeared alongside icons such as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in various 1940s comics (Keeler created characters such as Soapy Sam, Junior Genius, and the Rosebud Sisters).

During the time of Tim Burr, Keeler was working for an advertising agency in Tacoma, Washington. In 1950 he moved to Los Angeles and then later to New York where he achieved great success in the advertising industry. One of the original “Mad Men,” Keeler was the creative genius behind Folgers Coffee campaigns in the 1960s, and also did work for the 1967 Chevy Camaro, Western Airlines, Heinz Ketchup, and many other brands.

As for Tim Burr, his career proved to be much, much shorter. After taking a physical beating for a year, Tim made his final appearance in the May 1950 issue of Weyerhaeuser Magazine (we assume this coincides with Keeler’s departure from the Tacoma area). In the following issue (August 1950) a new safety character was introduced (stay tuned!), drawn by a new artist. A short item stated: “Tim Burr has retired to a well-deserved rest.”

Like all our Forgotten Characters, though, Tim continues to live on here in the Forest History Society Library and Archives. Continue below for more classic Tim Burr comics drawn by Jack Keeler.

Tim Burr comic September 1949. Click to view full strip.

Tim Burr comic November 1949. Click to view full strip.

Tim Burr comic January 1950. Click to view full strip.

Tim Burr comic March 1950. Click to view full strip.

Tim Burr comic May 1950. Click to view full strip.

Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America is the latest film from Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey for PBS’s American Experience series. It is made in the traditional PBS style, perfect for the Olmsted neophyte and ideal for classroom use because of its length (55 minutes) and subject matter. You can stream it from the American Experience website.

That Hott and Garey have made a film about the father of American landscape architecture and his legacy is of little surprise. As pioneers in the film genre of environmental biography, they have been circling Olmsted as a topic for a quarter century.

Their first two films produced for PBS broadly examined the history of wilderness in the United States. The Wilderness Idea: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot and the First Great Battle for Wilderness (1989) an oversimplified story of the “rivalry” between John Muir versus Gifford Pinchot and the debate over constructing the dam in Yosemite Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley is used to tell the larger history of how the United States came to embrace the idea of preserving wilderness (personified by Muir) as a sanctuary against the progressive, industrial society (as embodied by Pinchot) the country had become by the early 1900s.

Wild by Law: The Rise of Environmentalism and the Creation of the Wilderness Act (1991) picks up where The Wilderness Idea left off and handles the subject in a more nuanced way than does the earlier film. Viewers learn how “wilderness” evolved from a theoretical and philosophical construct, as expressed through the writings and experiences of foresters-turned-wilderness advocates Robert Marshall and Aldo Leopold, to a legal one embodied in the Wilderness Act, which exists largely due to the herculean work of the Wilderness Society’s Howard Zahniser. Since releasing those two films, Hott and Garey have done films on John James Audubon and John Muir, as well as environmental history films on the Adirondacks and two films on Niagara Falls (which Olmsted helped to restore and protect), and other topics of interest to environmental historians.

This new film covers the fascinating life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted. Born in 1822 to a prosperous Connecticut family, Olmsted spent the first 35 years of his life failing upwards. His formal education was limited due to frequent eye problems and he learned mostly through reading in the family’s book collection and observation while wandering the countryside. Oddly, this and some other telling details are not in the film. But we do learn that at 18, he started a series of jobs and unhappily labored as a surveyor, a clerk, and a deckhand on a merchant ship sailing to China (and nearly died) before his father bought him a farm at age 24. For six years he tried his hand at “scientific farming.” He failed at all these things but the experiences would be incorporated into his life’s work.

The film also does not mention that two years before giving up farming, Olmsted traveled to Britain with his brother John and Charles Loring Brace, a close friend who supplemented his travel expenses by writing for newspapers back home. (Brace later entered the ministry and became a social reformer in his own right.) Olmsted was stunned by the level of poverty he saw in England’s cities, and the aristocracy’s indifference to less fortunate humans reinforced his beliefs in democracy and doing what he could to help the poor. He took extensive walking tours of English gardens, public parks, and the countryside, travels that influenced his thinking not only about the purpose of public spaces but how landscapes mechanically functioned. Still thinking like a farmer while traveling, he saw how clayey fields drained and other things that would later find their way into his landscape design work.

He compiled his observations of British society from his journal entries and letters into a book, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, which led to his next job. If the film had concerned itself less with Olmsted’s personal life later on (the film’s attempts to humanize Olmsted by documenting the many deaths in his large family feel somewhat forced), more time could have been given over to revealing incidents like his time in England—ones that explain his interest in helping the poor and tell us more about the roots of his egalitarian vision for parks. At any rate, at age 30, Walks and Talks led to an agreement to tour the South for a then-new newspaper called the New York Times, and report on the economic aspect of slavery to their readers. His articles shaped Northern perspective on the matter and the experience turned him into a committed social reformer.

After a series of setbacks in 1857, including losing his job in publishing followed shortly by his beloved brother dying of tuberculosis, Olmsted landed the job of superintendent of New York’s Central Park, then under construction. He joined with architect Calvert Vaux and submitted a design for the park and won the public competition. His life, and America, were never the same after. In time cities would become livable because of protected greens spaces.

New York City as seen from the air, 2011. The green rectangle is Central Park, with ball fields at the left, or northern, end and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in the middle. (Author’s photo)

At this point, Hott and Garey begin doing what they do best as filmmakers. The film engagingly illustrates and explains the vision Olmsted had for Central Park’s design (and of those he subsequently developed), what made his parks so different from European parks, and also the impact of his parks on American society. The interviews with historians, park enthusiasts, and employees help us better understand the critical role the park still holds in New Yorker’s lives and by extension those of all Americans.

What we learn is that, to Olmsted, Central Park provided a democratic landscape. For the first time, men and women could recreate together—bicycling or ice skating, for example—and without chaperones. Additionally, the landscape allowed different classes and religions to mix. Yet Olmsted sought to impose an upper middle-class vision of behavior on the park’s visitors and hoped to have rules enforced. Rules included not walking on the lawns or using vulgar language, and visitors were expected to dress nicely. Olmsted’s skewed democratic vision is contrasted with footage of present-day Central Park visitors recreating in innumerable ways and a couple of interviews with those who use it. (One can only imagine how he would react to how people dress today while visiting his park.) It is this impulse to influence if not control behavior that gives deeper meaning to the film’s subtitle Designing America.

Central Park on a spring day. On any given day, you’ll find people boating, walking, bicycling, rollerblading, playing ball, or picnicking. (Author’s photo)

Thus began an on-again, off-again twenty-year relationship with the park as architect-in-chief as well as superintendent. His work at Central Park was interrupted by the Civil War, during which he established and led the U.S. Sanitation Commission (a precursor to the American Red Cross) for two years before exhausting himself and resigning. His experience with the commission and virtually every subsequent job repeated that of Central Park—“he did brilliant work,” narrator Stockard Channing tells us, “and quarreled bitterly with his superiors.” Actor Campbell Scott acquits himself well as the voice of Olmsted.

Olmsted went west and found work at an enormous mining operation near the Yosemite Valley area in California. He came to serve as head of the Yosemite Park Commission, which prepared a detailed assessment of the recently created national park. In writing the report he expounded upon a connection between land preservation and “the pursuit of happiness” and the role of a republican government in providing “means of protection for all its citizens” in that pursuit from “the selfishness of individuals or combinations of individuals.” His writings from this period provided a firm foundation upon which both the wilderness and conservation movements could and did in part build.

Yosemite Valley, which Olmsted advocated protection of in his report. (Author’s photo)

When the mining company went under a few years later, Olmsted returned to New York at the invitation of his old partner Vaux to plan and build Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Prospect Park differs dramatically in form and in history from Central Park. The latter was confined to a rectangular shape; they had greater freedoms in designing and building Prospect Park. They were told they had unlimited funds and few constraints on its shape. Their work touched off an urban park movement. Soon other cities across the country wanted what New York had. Olmsted, Vaux and Company—which opened an office in Manhattan—took on several other commissions, including a new park system in Buffalo, New York.

There, in the booming inland port city, they undertook a very ambitious plan. Instead of converting one location into a park, as the city leaders asked, they developed three separate areas and connected them by parkways—tree-lined boulevards that function like green arteries, connecting three green “hearts,” in this case three distinctive neighborhoods, with each park reflecting the characteristics of the surrounding neighborhoods. With the Buffalo plan, Olmsted moved beyond landscape architecture to, in effect, city planning. The parkway system became the template repeated by Olmsted and competing firms in many other cities, like Boston, Seattle, and Louisville. Interestingly, his attempt at planning an entire city was rejected. Asked by the Northern Pacific Railway to design their West Coast terminus city, Tacoma, Washington, Olmsted laid out a city with streets that followed the contours of the sloping land: it was a city plan “without a straight line or a right angle.” The client wanted a city laid out on the familiar grid system and didn’t accept the plan.

The challenge in designing any of these parks, we learn, is that a landscape architect must take the long view and look far out into the future: “In laying out Central Park, we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years,” wrote Olmsted. Each park’s open space, he felt, must be maintained and the impulse to fill in those spaces guarded against. In nearly every public project, Olmsted’s larger vision of open space would be sacrificed or ignored by impatient or unenlightened commission members in favor of ball fields or golf courses or, as in Boston, a zoo and a hospital.

The other notable point made is that Olmsted did not give us natural landscapes, but artificial ones—ones “every bit as artificial as Disney World,” asserts writer Adam Gopnik in one of the interview clips. According to landscape architect Faye Harwell both Walt Disney and Frederick Olmsted were masters of hiding engineering and “the nasty parts”—the waste management and the traffic management. What Olmsted was doing, Harwell says, was “creating stage sets for human life,” meaning beautiful backdrops and scenery. The point is punctuated by newsreel footage showing a mass wedding in Prospect Park from mid-twentieth century.

What we think is natural is artifice. Olmsted moved rocks and earth to create features like this in Central Park as well as other parks. (Author’s photo)

By age 70, Olmsted had created designs for every space imaginable: parks, gardens, hospitals, the U.S. Capital, and even a world’s fair, the White City at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. One of his last commissions was not for public space but for a private residence. In the early 1890s, millionaire George Vanderbilt was constructing his country home in western North Carolina, the Biltmore Estate. He invited Olmsted to design the gardens and parkland. Olmsted encouraged Vanderbilt to think bigger—and at the same time to give back to his country—by initiating forest management on the exhausted farmland he had purchased. In time, Vanderbilt would own 125,000 of forested acres which became home to America’s first school of forestry, a site now preserved as the Cradle of Forestry in America.

Frederick Olmsted, around 1895. Biltmore Estate Forester Carl Schenck described him thus: He was “not merely the great authority on all landscapism and indeed the creator of landscape architecture in the U.S.A.; he was also the inspirer of American forestry. And he was more: he was the loveliest and most loveable old man whom I have ever met.” (Forest History Society Photo FHS294)

By 1895, dementia had begun to affect Olmsted’s ability to work, so he retired and turned the business over to his sons. His wife cared for him for three years before placing him in McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Ironically, he had submitted a design plan for the grounds there years before but it was rejected. He died in 1903. Long before then, the film makes amply clear, Frederick Law Olmsted had made parks an essential part of American life and society.

Have you ever been in an urban forest and had the feeling that you were off in the wild because you could no longer hear any cars? Did you find yourself on a river trail and felt as Emerson did when he wrote, “In the woods, is perpetual youth”? Or have you been in state park, turned on a trail and thought, “Geez, I’m in the wilderness!”? I can answer “yes” to all three of those questions. Here in the Durham area we have Duke Forest, the Eno River, and Umstead State Park, respectively, to explore and escape to. I find being in the forest—and what feels like wilderness in this increasingly urbanized region—is often restorative, if not transformative.

Scholars will tell you there are both legal and cultural constructs of wilderness. While Duke Forest, Eno River, and Umstead State Park are not, by legal definition, wilderness, such places do give a sense of being in wilderness. In many ways, it comes down to perception, to paraphrase William Cronon from his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” These are places where I, too, experience what he calls “the sacred in nature”—places near my home.

Duke Forest, Umstead Park, and the Eno River, where this was taken, are very popular with the Durham running community. During the 2012 Eno River Race, I experienced both “the sacred in nature” and the profane as I forded the cold river.

Wilderness, in all its many constructs, was celebrated around the United States on September 3, 2014, when its supporters commemorated how the legal construct of wilderness has been protecting the cultural one for 50 years. It was on that date in 1964 that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, which created the National Wilderness Preservation System, the most extensive system of protected wild lands in the United States. Since its signing, the law has continually inspired people to protect wilderness and enjoy it, too.

As someone who studies the history of forests and how humans interact with them for a living, I’ve been fortunate enough to spend time in and write about both legally designated wilderness areas in Montana and places that are wilderness areas in all but legal standing, like in Maine. So it’s more than a little ironic that as someone who enjoys running and hiking wooded trails, I’ve not visited any of North Carolina’s twelve federal wilderness areas. But it’s fine with me. I have Duke Forest, the Eno River, and Umstead Park, even though they aren’t on that list. It doesn’t alter my enjoyment of these places—if anything, it makes me appreciate them all the more because they remain wooded oases in this rapidly urbanizing area.

What these local places have in common with federal wilderness areas is how they came to be protected and cherished spaces. The history of each involves someone at some point looking at a landscape, whether it was abandoned agricultural fields in need of restoration (like Umstead) or a forested area in need of protection (like Joyce Kilmer-Slick Rock Wilderness in western North Carolina), and deciding that intervening on behalf of the public was a greater good for the land.

In the case of what would become federal wilderness areas, the effort was led in large part by Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and Howard Zahniser, whose story is the focus of the Academy Award­–nominated documentary film Wild By Law by Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey. All three men were leaders of the Wilderness Society, an organization formed in 1935 by Leopold, Marshall, and six other men to counter the rapid development of national parks for motorized recreation. The Wilderness Society supported projects like the Appalachian Trail but opposed others like the Blue Ridge Parkway because roadways like it were built at the expense of wilderness. (The tension between access to wilderness and protecting its integrity that led to the Society’s establishment is still a divisive issue today.) Zahniser, the executive secretary of the Society from 1945 until his death in 1964, carried forward the torch lit by Leopold and Marshall by writing the Wilderness Act and serving as its strongest advocate. The efforts of these and many other people have led to the protection of countless beautiful areas.

At just under an hour long, Wild By Law is a great introduction to this turning point in American history. Last September, a day after I addressed a community meeting in Wallace, Idaho, where people are struggling to make a living in a region surrounded by wilderness both protected and perceived, I hosted a screening of the film at the Durham County Library and a question-and-answer session. The discussions in both towns reminded me that passion runs high on the issue of wilderness protection, and that the issue is and will remain a complex one, but for good reasons. It means we still care.

I encourage you to seek out this film and any relevant history books (there are too many to list here) and then to reflect on 50 years of the Wilderness Act and all that it has done for what President Johnson called “the total relation between man and the world around him.” I also hope you’ll start visiting wilderness areas—however you wish to define them.

In large measure, wilderness is all a matter of perspective. Where do you think this was taken? On federal, state, or private land? In a designated wilderness area, or in my backyard? Does it matter?

Much like today’s celebrities, Hollywood stars of the 1920s never missed an opportunity to align themselves with a cause that everyone could get behind. In 1923, industry leaders joined with conservation leaders like Gifford Pinchot and William Greeley to establish the American Reforestation Association, which sought to leverage Hollywood’s PR machinery and the exploding popularity of films (as well as radio and print media) in order to educate Americans about the need for and importance of planting trees. Reforesting America became the obsession of Hollywood royalty like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

In honor of Arbor Day, we bring you Hollywood’s brightest stars circa 1925. The photos come from a promotional book published by the Association that year. Don’t you love how they dressed for the occasion? I know I put on my Sunday best for gardening.

The list above shows all the stars and starlets who appeared in the book.

To read the original captions, click on the photo.

Swashbuckling star of the silver screen Douglas Fairbanks.

Mary Pickford, the original “America’s Sweetheart,” was a cofounder of United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin.

Comic legend Harold Lloyd, minus his trademark horn-rimmed glasses.

Harriet Hammond (spelled differently in the book) was a Max Sennett Bathing Beauty. You may know her from such films as “Gee Whiz!” and “By Golly.” I know I always wear furs and heels when planting trees.

Jackie Coogan, who later went on to play Uncle Fester on “The Addams Family” television show, was one of the highest paid stars in film in 1923.

Actors from the “Our Gang” series helped out, too. Oh, those Little Rascals!

“How could we lose this forest?” It’s a history mystery we’d been working on for more than two weeks when Molly Tartt, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution in western North Carolina, asked me that in an email. Indeed, how does a 50-acre forest vanish from maps and memory? No one knows where the forest is today, and few have heard of it. It’s more legend than fact at this point, it seems. Molly had been searching for some time and turned to FHS for help, fittingly, just before Independence Day.

A December 1939 newspaper article trumpeted the DAR’s plans for planting a forest to “memorialize the North Carolina patriots who took part in the struggle for independence.” An area that had been heavily logged and burned over would be reforested. The plan called for 60,000 trees to be planted on 25 to 40 acres set aside for the memorial (we believe it to actually be about 50 acres) in an area between Devil’s Courthouse and Mount Hardy Gap. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) announced at around the same time that they intended to plant 125,000 red spruce and balsam trees nearby to commemorate each North Carolina man who served in the Confederate Army. Today there is a wooden sign for that forest at the Mount Hardy overlook.

The DAR memorial forest project was part of a national conservation campaign by the organization leading up to its golden jubilee in 1941. The nation was facing the twin crises of economic depression and ecological disaster. It may have been the Dust Bowl years on the Great Plains, but in the Appalachian Mountains, forests and watersheds were suffering too. Though the land was within the Pisgah National Forest, logging companies had contracts to cut and proceeded to do so via railroad logging. The rail lines extended deep into the mountains, with the labor of men and machines combining to take a toll on the Southern Appalachian forests.

Map showing logging railroads in the early 20th century. The forest is between Devil’s Courthouse and Little Sam Knob. From Thomas Fetters, Logging Railroads of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains: Volume 1, Cold Mountain, Black Mountain and White Top, pg. 227 (2007)

Railroad logging, as seen in the top photo, left behind landscapes like in the bottom photo. The slash and debris left by loggers was prone to fire, which happened on the land where DAR dedicated its forest. Both photos were taken somewhere in Haywood County, NC, about 20 years before the DAR plantings. The memorial forest is located in southern Haywood County. (FHS4310 and K_1-166337)

To combat the twin problems of human and environmental poverty, President Franklin Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. Women’s groups of all stripes wanted to do their part, and in the DAR’s case, the jubilee provided motivation. According to the organization’s “DAR Forests” webpage:

In 1939, the President General, Mrs. Henry M. Robert, chose the Penny Pine program as one of her Golden Jubilee National Projects. Each state was to have a memorial forest, beginning in 1939 and culminating in 1941 on the NSDAR 50th Anniversary. Each chapter across the country was to pledge, at the very least, one acre of pine seedlings. Five dollars an acre at a penny each equaled 500 trees. The Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC), under the supervision of the U.S. Forestry [sic] Service, would do the actual work of planting and care.

The DAR’s interest in Appalachia’s forests has deep roots, stretching back to the Progressive Era and the debates over the need to protect the headwaters of navigable waterways in the East. According to environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, “In 1909 Mrs. Mathew T. Scott was elected President General of the 77,000 member Daughters of the American Revolution…. Mrs. Scott was an enthusiastic conservationist who encouraged the maintenance of a conservation committee consisting of 100 members representing every state.” (One of the women deeply involved in the conservation committee was Gifford Pinchot‘s mother, Mary.) Under Scott’s leadership, DAR conservation efforts included working towards the “preservation of the Appalachian watersheds, the Palisades, and Niagara Falls.”[1]

By then, forest conservation leaders in North Carolina had been agitating for nearly two decades for state and federal protection of forests and watersheds. They formed the state’s forestry association in 1911, and its forest service in 1915. And although the Weeks Act of 1911 had led to the creation of the Pisgah National Forest in 1916, where the proposed memorial forest would be located, federal management didn’t immediately translate into better environmental conditions. Logging companies carried out their existing contracts and logged what they could—in this case taking “one of the best virgin stands of spruce in the United States,” according to a 1941 newspaper report, and leaving “only a few scattered trees of merchantable species due to clearcutting” and fire—before turning over land to the Forest Service.[2]

In the late 1930s the conservation (and patriotic) ethos of the local and state DAR chapters was strong and members were highly motivated to take action on many fronts. This can be seen through reports about the state chapter in the annual national congress proceedings, beginning the same year President General Robert announced the golden jubilee project.

Proceedings of the Forty-Eighth Continental Congress of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Washington, DC, April 17-21, 1939: “North Carolina—Mrs. Hugh McAllister, Chairman [of conservation]. Chairman urged legislation for eradication of Dutch elm disease and the planting of a memorial forest in Pisgah National Forest in 1940. Thirty acres have already been reforested and 20 acres trimmed. A total of 37,444 trees planted.”(114)

Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Continental Congress, April 15-19, 1940: “North Carolina—Mrs. Hugh McAllister, reports that Golden Jubilee Forest has been completed and will be dedicated on May 15^th. Conservation of holly and other evergreen trees has been urged and 54,331 trees planted.”(120)

Proceedings of the Fiftieth Continental Congress, April 14-19, 1941: “North Carolina—Mrs. Leet A. O’Brien, Chairman. Golden Jubilee Memorial Forest of 50 acres planted and dedicated May 15, 1940; 3,184 other trees were used in beautification projects.”(156)

On May 15, 1940, six months after announcing the planting project, state and national DAR leaders drove out a winding mountain road from Waynesville to the Pisgah National Forest for the dedication ceremony along the Blue Ridge Parkway, then under construction. Mrs. Robert traveled from her home in Maryland to accept the forest on behalf of the national organization, and Mrs. McAllister presided over the proceedings. The only man invited to participate in the program was the U.S. Forest Service’s H. B. Bosworth, Pisgah National Forest’s supervisor, who briefly explained the federal government’s reforestation projects on that windy day. You can see the ladies trying to keep their hats on in the few remaining photos.

Pisgah Forest Supervisor H.B. Bosworth addresses the gathering. The women aren’t saluting; they’re holding on to their hats.

The site was to be marked with a bronze tablet mounted on a large boulder, like in the second photograph down below, and placed at a parking area adjacent to the forest. We don’t know where the above photo is taken, or what road that is above them (or if it’s even a road). A photo from the ceremony (below) shows a sign attached to two poles. We don’t know if the sign is bronze or wood, or if a tablet attached to a rock was ever installed. (Demand for bronze after U.S. entry into World War II meant postponing the casting of the UDC tablet, whose ceremony was two years later, until after the war.) The reforestation effort didn’t begin until 1941, when the seedlings were mature enough to plant.

This is the only photo we have seen showing the sign. We’ve recently learned the poles were made of brass.

Illinois Society Daughters of the American Revolution at dedication of D.A.R. Diamond Jubilee cooperative forest plantation on the Shawnee National Forest, Illinois, 1940. Presumably  the one in North Carolina would have used a rock of similar size. At far left is Margaret March-Mount, who launched the Penny Pines campaign. (FHS Photo Collection, R9_419109; USFS photo 419109)

It’s not known when the forest went “missing.” I’ve found only a single mention of the DAR forest after 1942; it was in a 1951 newspaper column “Looking Back Over the Years” that recapped news from ten years before, and it was about planting the seedlings. The UDC forest planted was “misplaced” for a few decades but was relocated and rededicated in 2002.

Research conducted here at FHS and in western North Carolina has narrowed the DAR forest to being around the Devil’s Courthouse overlook at mile marker 422, on the north side (see map). It’s rather ironic that alongside the newspaper article in the April 24, 1941, announcing the arrival of the spruce seedlings for planting is one about the romantic comedy film opening in town that weekend. The now-forgotten film The Man Who Lost Himself centers around a case of mistaken identity and redemption that of course ends happily. If you know anything about this forest that was lost and possibly mistaken for another, please email me at James.Lewis AT foresthistory.org. We’d like to identify this forest and write a happy ending for this story, too.

“X” marks the possible location of the DAR forest. Click on the map to enlarge.

UPDATE: 7/29/2015

Since the original post went up, we received the map below courtesy of Molly Tartt. She received the copy from a former Forest Service employee. The map is dated three days before the newspaper article mentioned above that the seedlings had arrived.

US Forest Service map of the area showing the two memorial plantations, dated April 21, 1941. Click the map to see it enlarged. The chain-like symbol with the line through the links represents the county line and the same symbol without the line is either a road or a trail.

Close-up of the area from the same map. The parkway runs on the south side of both forests.

This satellite photo indicates where the forest is most likely located today (1). It’s curious that there are other clusters of what appear to be similar species in the vicinity, as indicated by numbers 2-5.

Many thanks to Molly Tartt and to the researchers and historians at the DAR library in Washington, DC, for their help and to all who provided photos and other sources.

NOTES

[1] Carolyn Merchant, “Women of the Progressive Conservation Movement: 1900-1916,”  Environmental Review Vol. 8, No. 1: 68-69.

[2] “Patriotic Groups Planting Memorial Forests in Pisgah,” Waynesville Mountaineer, April 24, 1941.

Austin Cary, one of the great unsung heroes of American forestry, was born this date in 1865 in East Machias, Maine. A Yankee through and through, he found professional success in the South, eventually becoming known as the “Father of Southern Forestry.” In 1961, twenty-five years after Cary’s passing, his biographer Roy R. White wrote of him:

In contrast with his more renowned contemporaries, Austin Cary was an obscure logging engineer in the Forest Service. Yet the story of the life and work of this latter-day Johnny Appleseed has reached legendary proportions in the southern pine country. Cary, a New England Yankee, dedicated himself to the awesome task of bringing forestry and conservation to a region reluctant to accept, and ill-equipped to practice, these innovations. His success places him in the forefront of noted American foresters and his character warrants a position peculiarly his own.

What makes Cary an intriguing historical figure was his unorthodox, nonconformist approach to life and work. He hailed from an old, well-to-do family whose wealth made him financially independent. By the time he graduated at the head of his class from Bowdoin College, where he majored in science with emphasis on botany and entomology and received the A.B. degree in 1887 and the M.S. in 1890, he was already known as a “lone wolf” comfortable tramping alone in the woods. Despite his refined upbringing, he was called blunt and tactless, and that was by his friends. The “dour New Englander” struggled in several different jobs before finding his niche, in part because of his personality. He moved from industry forester in New England to college instructor (Yale Forest School, 1904-1905; Harvard, 1905-1909), and then in 1910, to logging engineer in the U.S. Forest Service.

Between 1898 and 1910, Cary kept asking for a job with the Forest Service. Chief Gifford Pinchot refused to hire him, though, perhaps because of his personality, more likely because of philosophical differences. Cary strongly believed that private forestry, and providing economic incentive to private land owners to hold land and reforest it, was the nation’s best hope for conserving America’s forests, whereas Pinchot had staked his agency’s position on the federal government dominating land management. Only after Pinchot’s dismissal in 1910 did Cary get hired by the Forest Service—by Pinchot’s replacement and Cary’s former boss at Yale, Henry Graves, who supported Cary’s position to some extent.

Carl Schenck wrote of Austin Cary, here photographed in Florida in 1932, “[He] was as good with the axe as if he were a Canadian lumberjack.” (FHS Photo Collection)

Cary didn’t fit in there and relations deteriorated. Given the choice of assignments in 1917, Cary choose the South, where the Forest Service had little presence and he could create his own program. “Significantly,” White tells us, “he planned an appeal to southern landowners and operators, large and small. It would be necessary, he knew, to influence a people generally hostile to strangers, notoriously averse to change, and shackled by a near-feudal economy.” The “lone wolf” found a home in the southern woods, which were (and still are) largely privately owned and at the time in need of intervention. Though his title was that of logging engineer, he operated as a roving extension forester.

When he arrived, the South’s First Forest was nearly exhausted. “Into the void of southern forestry he intended to introduce forest practices which would assure a second timber growth on the barren, smoldering land,” wrote White, where fire was widely used. The Forest Service campaigned to eliminate it from southern forests; Cary defied them because he saw the ecological role fire played, and instead encouraged landowners to experiment with what are now called prescribed burns. Somehow this direct, straight-shooting Yankee won over Southern landowners. He was not allied with one large company and they didn’t really think of him as Forest Service; they were charmed by “his disrespect for propriety and authority” and his personality. Their conservatism matched his, and he became a staunch defender of their practices and land rights. This culminated in a bitter denunciation of the New Deal–era federal land acquisition in 1935, captured in an open letter to President Franklin Roosevelt that Forest Service officials initially tried to suppress. In the end, they decided it was less painful to suffer his opposition than to silence him, and allowed the letter to be published in the Journal of Forestry. Thumbing his nose at the ultimate authority was his last significant action before he retired in 1935.

“With a new forest turning the South green once again,” he decided to “‘bang around less…live more quietly'” and retired to Maine. He died on April 28, 1936. The well-managed private forestlands in both New England and the South are just a portion of his impressive legacy.

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You can read more about Austin Cary and his legacy in Roy White’s article “Austin Cary: The Father of Southern Forestry,” where all quotes in this article are from, and by exploring the many resources we have on him listed below:

The Austin Cary Photograph Collection contains images taken by Cary between 1918 and 1924 during his early years of working in the South for the Forest Service. The photographs document forestry and turpentining practices in the pine forests of the southeastern United States. We have a finding aid and online photo gallery.

Interviews with several foresters who discuss the positive influence of Cary reside in the “Development of Forestry in the Southern United States Oral History Interview 

A 1959 oral history interview with Charles A. Cary includes discussion of his family background and his uncle Austin Cary.

Some of Cary’s acidic nature is evident in his correspondence with Carl A. Schenck in this Journal of Forest History article.

We also have two folders’ worth of materials in our U.S. Forest Service History Collection.

His papers are housed at the University of Florida.

The following is an op-ed piece by FHS staff historian James G. Lewis that appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on August 9, 2015, in honor of Gifford Pinchot’s 150th birthday on August 11. 

Born just after the guns of the Civil War fell silent, he died the year after the first atomic bomb was dropped. He was, in his own words, a “governor every now and then” but a forester all the time. Indeed, Gifford Pinchot, born 150 years ago on Aug. 11, served two terms as Pennsylvania governor but is best known as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service (established 1905), which today manages 192 million acres. He also created the Society of American Foresters (1900), the organization that oversees his chosen profession, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (1900), the oldest forestry school in America. And just south of Asheville, in the Pisgah National Forest, is the Cradle of Forestry in America, both of which exist in part because of him.

But perhaps his greatest legacy is his prescient call, made 75 years ago, for conservation as the foundation for permanent peace.

Gifford Pinchot during his tenure as Forest Service chief.

When Pinchot enrolled at Yale College in 1885, his father encouraged him to pursue forestry. It was a radical idea. The United States had no forestry school, no working foresters, no land being managed on scientific principles. To become a forester, in 1889 Pinchot traveled to Europe. There he met Sir Dietrich Brandis, who was leading British forestry students on tours of sustainably managed forests in Germany. The best way to introduce forestry to the United States, Brandis told him, was to demonstrate that scientific forest management could earn a private landowner a steady income.

Pinchot came home in 1890 full of ideas but few job prospects. Through family connections, he learned of George Vanderbilt’s great undertaking in Asheville. Vanderbilt hired him to be his estate’s—and thus the nation’s—first working forester. When some of Pinchot’s employees began asking why he did things a certain way, like selecting only some trees to cut instead of cutting them all, he decided to teach them in the evenings.

Pinchot didn’t have the temperament to be a teacher, and the classes, such as they were, didn’t last. But fortunately for America, his forestry exhibit at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and accompanying booklet, Biltmore Forest, attracted wider attention, and he left Biltmore in 1895. On his recommendation, Vanderbilt hired Carl Alwin Schenck, another Brandis protégé, who in 1898 established the Biltmore Forest School, the first forestry school in America.

In 1898, Pinchot was appointed chief of what would become the U.S. Forest Service. He and his friend President Theodore Roosevelt made forestry the focus of a national conservation movement. The two held national and North American conservation conferences before Roosevelt left office in 1909. An international one was scuttled after Pinchot was fired by President Taft in 1910.

A political progressive, Pinchot next plunged into politics. No matter what office he ran for—governor, senator, representative—he advocated for human rights and sustainably managed natural resources. In the 1930s, he watched as Europe and Asia waged wars in large part over access to natural resources. His 1940 observation that “international co-operation in conserving, utilizing, and distributing natural resources to the mutual advantage of all nations might well remove one of the most dangerous of all obstacles to a just and permanent world peace” rings louder even today and is a premise of the just-released UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Although planting a tree or visiting the Cradle of Forestry are good ways to commemorate Gifford Pinchot’s 150th birthday on Aug. 11, the best way to honor America’s first forester is to continue working for conservation and, by extension, world peace.

James Lewis is the staff historian at the Forest History Society in Durham and an executive producer of “First in Forestry: Carl Schenck and the Biltmore Forest School.” The film will have its world premiere at Brevard College on Aug. 30 and its television premiere on UNC-TV in 2016.